2x 500GB in RAID vs 1TB Single HDD

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I want whats best for performance as I'm a gamer. What would be better:

2x Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA-II 16MB Cache

or

1x Samsung SpinPoint F3 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache

Basically, RAID-0 with 2x 16MB Cache HDD's or single 32MB Cache HDD, would there be much of a performance gap? Keep in mind it is cheaper to just get a single HDD. Never done a RAID before and my knowledge of hard-drives is lacking...
 
A single hdd will give you about 100mb/sec where as a RAID setup will roughly double that.

I went from a single 500GB F1 which gave around 90mb/sec to 2x WD RE3 in RAID0 & now its more like 210mb/sec. Games load a bit faster & levels etc are faster but it's not a huge margin, windows does feel a bit sharper though (reacts faster & pics load quicker etc)

It's down to what you want to spend & what difference you are expecting, probably 1.5 times the price for RAID to save a few seconds loading games...thats what it boils down to.
 
Id say grab something like RAID if you're using HD intensive applications like adobe lightroom with large libaries... makes life a lot easier.

I might deraid my 500gb's soon because I can't read temperatures or monitor smart status, so if the drives go wrong you find out at the last minute :p

Worth a shot at raiding if you haven't done it before though. I personally would buy 2x500GB anyway instead of 1TB, talk about storing all your eggs in one basket? Of course if you RAID 0 the 2 drives a failure will destroy all data anyway.
 
Hmm, I'm still not so sure. Paying more money just for a few seconds off loading times in games... But then again, RAID will also help all over the board, for example no stuttering when opening photos and MP3's, and faster defrags?

Over the course of time, it would be quite nice...
 
This was my first venture into raid, 2x 320 drives run very well, mind you I only have os & games on it so if it goes **** up then I'm ok.
It deffo feels snappier to me, TF2 etc is faster to load levels so in general I'm very happy with it. I don't need this much space for os & games only though lol.

I would suggest 2 small drives for raiding & one large for data etc. always back up important stuff & you won't be on here crying one day ;)
 
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